Vivaldi is building “Opera as it should’ve been”

By staying private, and not raising VC, Vivaldi wants to avoid Opera's mistakes.

Working in tight niches occupied by the behemoths of the Internet world is hard; doing it as a startup without external funding is even harder. The 35-strong team of Vivaldi, the spiritual successor to Opera, is doing exactly that: two years after the first public beta and eight months after the release of version 1.0, the Web browser has about 1 million users—but it still isn't turning a profit.

Vivaldi, which was envisioned by the Opera Software co-founder and former CEO Jon Stephenson von Tetzchner, is catering first of all to power users and the tech-savvy lot. The team, however, has high expectations for their product and hopes it will have a broader appeal over time in order to start actually making money.

More is more

In case you haven't heard about Vivaldi before, it's a Chromium-based “non-conformist” desktop Web browser that goes in the opposite direction to the mainstream. While the major players like Chrome or Firefox are stripping the browser to its bare essentials, Vivaldi offers more and more integrated features and customisation options.

“We're a startup, and there's no reason for anybody to use yet another browser if it looks the same as the others and works the same way,” Tatsuki Tomita, Vivaldi COO and co-founder, tells Ars. “So we're focusing on users who want more out of the browsing experience.”

Further Reading

You can decide where to put the tabs, which tab to open after the current one is closed, change or add practically any shortcut, and much more. Among the most popular features, according to Tomita, are tab stacking and the possibility to tile a number of tabs in the same window.

Recently the team released a bunch of new features, such as tab notifications (which can also be unreliably achieved in Chrome with extensions) and integration with Philips Hue light bulbs. The latter allows the user to control the colour and brightness of the bulb right from the browser. According to Tomita, further integration will soon allow the user to change Hue's behaviour on triggers like Facebook messages or e-mails from certain people.

In addition to that, Vivaldi emphasises its focus on privacy and stability, claiming that no user data is either collected by the browser or sent to other parties, including Google.

Further Reading

Talking about the company's plans for 2017, Tomita says that the two main releases will be the mobile version of the browser and an integrated e-mail client, which a significant number of users have been asking for. On mobile, Vivaldi will only be available for Android, as iOS doesn't allow developers to go deep enough.

"iOS has a lot of restrictions, you can't really have your own rendering engine ported there," Tomita says. "You can have your UI on top of Webkit—but that's not the extent we'd like to do it to."

Tomita didn’t comment on the features of the mobile version of Vivaldi, mentioning only that “on a bigger screen, it makes sense to have a more full experience, but it's still in the works.”

Bootstrapping a browser

Building a rapidly growing and evolving product without raising external funding is no easy task, but it was a conscious decision made by the founders of Vivaldi.

"We had a lot of interest from VCs but decided that we don't really need it, we can do it on our own," Tomita says. "I think it makes a difference, as you have so much more control over the direction of the company. Obviously, all the VCs need to exit in order to return the money. We want to build this company for the long haul."

In order to stay afloat, Vivaldi has to rely on its community for some tasks, particularly for testing the browser. The company has only two in-house testers, while most of the work is done by enthusiasts who gather on the community website Vivaldi.net. With that in mind, the startup plans to push the long-awaited integrated e-mail client as an alpha release for the volunteers to play with.

Enlarge/ Part of Vivaldi's team in Iceland. Tatsuki Tomita is sitting in the green bean bag; Jon von Tetzchner is first from the left in the middle row.

Vivaldi

The way the browser is built also has to do with cost-saving. Unlike other browsers that are written as native applications for each desktop OS they support, Vivaldi's UI core is basically a Web application that runs on top of Chromium. This allows the team to maintain a single code base and make changes simultaneously to all versions.

Making this work was the biggest technical challenge the team faced, as it "took a little longer than we thought to achieve the kind of performance that we want," says Tomita. Another challenge is to keep an eye on Chromium code base.

"At Opera we wrote everything from scratch, all the code was our own," he says. "This time, we're using Chromium, and we need to make sure that everything works properly and nothing gets sent to Google without us and our users knowing. We make money from search engines, not from selling user data."

Most of Vivaldi's revenue comes from the company pre-installing search engines in the browser. In Europe and the US, it works with Microsoft (Bing) and Yahoo, while in Eastern Europe it also has contracts with Yandex. The projection is that in order to turn a profit it needs to have from 3 to 5 million users—so a significant increase is required from the current number of about 1 million.

Andrii Degeler
Andrii is a contributing reporter at Ars Technica UK, covering a wide range of topics from policy to hardware and crowdfunding. He holds a master's degree in Journalism from the University of Groningen, the Netherlands. Emailandrii@proceed.to//Twitter@adegeler